Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
I am disposed to believe, however, that the Government will not be
brutish enough, obstinately to reject the advice given to them on this
head, it being observed, however, that I wish to have no hand in their
proceedings, directly or indirectly. I can sell all the trees that I
have for sale to other customers. Let them look out for themselves; and
as to any reports that their creatures may make upon the subjects I
shall be able to produce proofs enough that such reports, if
unfavourable, are false. I wrote, in a Register from Long Island, that I
could if I would tell insolent Castlereagh, who was for making
Englishmen dig holes one day and fill them up the next, how he might
_profitably put something into those holes_, but that I would not tell
him as long as the Borough-mongers should be in the state in which they
then were. They are no longer in that state, I thank God. There has been
no positive law to alter their state, but it is manifest that there must
be such law before it be long. Events are working together to make the
country worth living in, which, for the great body of the people, is at
present hardly the case. Above all things in the world, it is the duty
of every man, who has it in his power, to do what he can to promote the
creation of materials for the building of ships in the best manner; and
it is now a fact of perfect notoriety, that, with regard to the building
of ships, it cannot be done in the best manner without the assistance of
this sort of wood.
I have seen a specimen of the locust wood used in the making of
furniture. I saw it in the posts of a bed-stead; and any thing more
handsome I never saw in my life. I had used it myself in the making of
rules; but I never saw it in this shape before. It admits of a polish
nearly as fine as that of box. It is a bright and beautiful yellow. And
in bedsteads, for instance, it would last for ever, and would not become
loose at the joints, like oak and other perishable wood; because, like
the live oak and the red cedar, no worm or insect ever preys upon it.
There is no fear of the quantity being too great. It would take a
century to make as many plantations as are absolutely wanted in England.
It would be a prodigious creation of real and solid wealth. Not such a
creation as that of paper money, which only takes the dinner from one
man and gives it to another, which only gives an unnatural swell to a
city or a watering place by beggaring a thousand villages; but it would
be a creation of money's worth things. Let any man go and look at a
farmhouse that was built a hundred years ago. He will find it, though
very well built with stone or brick, actually falling to pieces, unless
very frequently repaired, owing entirely to the rotten wood in the
window-sills, the door-sills, the plates, the pins, the door frames, the
window frames, and all those parts of the beams, the joists, and the
rafters, that come in contact with the rain or the moisture. The two
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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